I have always been proud of the Watergate record of the media in general–and in particular of NEWSWEEK and its corporate sibling, The Washington Post. Obviously, others did the really important work: without Judge John Sirica, the key senators on the Watergate panel, the dogged investigators, the eloquent victims of the Saturday Night Massacre and the courageous members of the impeachment committee, the whole scandal would have imploded in a cynical wink. But the press did bring out important facts, focus public attention, read the nation a civics lesson and help stiffen the spines of the key players. Pride is justified.
It was an exciting, scary, risky time. I have gray hairs and night twitches from each of the 40 Watergate cover packages I edited as NEWSWEEK’S national-affairs editor. I remember the confrontations with the White House (“Goddam it, you can’t mean to print that!”) and the matter-of-fact resolution of reporters and top editors. Their own spines were stiffened by the faith that our owner, Katharine Graham, showed in us all. In the end, we in the media justified our existence: we did what a free press is supposed to do. And the nation, we thought, was stronger because of what we did.
But Watergate taught us the wrong lessons. It made us smug and complacent. Like actors puffed up with good reviews, we became self-caricatures; like triumphant generals, we prepared to fight the previous war. And when the nation got into trouble again–and again, and again–the media weren’t up to the job.
Watergate marked the era of celebrity journalism. A generation of reporters saw themselves as Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing an idealized Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, bagging a presidential head as a trophy on the wall. Reporters got increasingly confrontational; investigation was the only kind of reporting that counted, and anyone in office was fair game for the gumshoes. TV correspondents practiced the art of baiting White House press aides. Journalism became a game of successive ‘gates: Koreagate, Irangate, Anygate. But at the same time, other journalists recoiled in, horror at the growing myth of Watergate. In the legend, it was the media that had taken down a president, and sober editors and publishers feared a public backlash at the power of the press. In the aftermath, when push came to shove on any scandal, a certain timidity set in. Nobody wanted “another Watergate.”
Watergate also taught us to trivialize. Presidents were to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, which the Founding Fathers never got around to defining, but we in the media connived at reducing that grand concept to a legalistic search for smoking guns, a shabby procession of clowns testifying about schemes to catch Democrats with prostitutes or steal their psychiatric records. The larger issue of a president’s lying to the people, destroying the democratic process and subverting the Constitution was conceded to be an abstract bore; the part of the story that would raise public outrage and persuade Congress to act was filthy language in the Oval Office and rolls of bills left in phone booths.
That process also worked in reverse: if a story couldn’t be trivialized, it simply wasn’t a big story, no matter how important it might be. A story of any complexity became automatically boring and practically didn’t exist. We lost our sense of what big stories were really about. We swallowed the notion, for instance, that the gulf war was to defend America’s interests in the Mideast. But we never asked effectively what those interests might be; we were much too fascinated by the spectade of smart bombs diving down ventilator shafts in downtown Baghdad. Closer to home, the S&L disaster was no secret; it had been thoroughly aired in the financial pages, including NEWSWEEK’S, for years before it reached crisis stage. It was just a bore until we got to looted Rembrandts and party girls on yachts. These days the federal deficit has the whole country uneasy, but we in the media haven’t found a way to simple it down, so it’s still a bore.
The sad end of Watergate came in the Iran-contra scandal. As a constitutional crime, in my view at least, Iran-contra was far more serious than the election pranks and political cover-ups of Watergate. The Reagan White House was clearly scheming to break laws and thwart the will of Congress, and it was conniving at the creation of a SMERSH-like private CIA that would be capable of untold mischief. But though we told the story, we never got it focused; to most people, Iran-contra wasn’t a serious problem.
In part, that was because media and Congress alike flinched at the braggadocio of Oliver North and the avuncular obfuscations of Ronald Reagan. White House public relations were more effective than in Watergate: instead of wholesale denials, the Reaganauts proclaimed what they had done and defended it as a matter of principle, challenging their foes to prove legalistic technicalities. Washington didn’t have the stomach for “going through all that again” with a popular president in the twilight of his career. So everyone pretended not to see all the smoking guns, the story became a public yawn, and six years later the special prosecutor is still plodding through the legal thickets.
Yes, Watergate was our finest hour. Someday, I hope, we’ll get over it.
